I agree that season 1 is far more engaging but imo, that’s mainly because the level of intrigue that I felt at the beginning of the story was insane — they were great at keeping that intrigue rolling in an interesting way. But that kind of mystery can only last so long, because it grows weaker as the audience learns more about the characters and world.

I think there was a part of me that felt disappointed by season 2 simply by the fact it couldn’t give me what I felt during season 1, and actually, I wouldn’t want that — the final episodes of a series shouldn’t have the same kind of tension of the beginning of the story.

Overall, I’d say that season 1 is excellent (in particular, there were some visually impressive and stylish sequenced that I loved) — Riveting" was the word OP used. Season 2 is also decent. I don’t recall it feeling rushed, and it does end decently.

I feel like I’m haunted by linear algebra because it keeps cropping up in all sorts of places

A friend of mine had a partner accidentally draw blood when he (consensually) bit them. It got infected and they needed quite serious hospital care. I suppose that counts.

If I wanted an autistically over-literal answer, I’d either ask myself (or come to Lemmy)

Stochastic parrots is an excellent phrase.

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I never thought of this before, the parody song practically writes itself

It’ll probably be something super obvious and I’ll feel silly for asking, but “IS”?

Yeah, I agree with you. I should have elaborated in my comment. I’m not too opposed to Cloudflare (I even use them myself), but I sympathise with people who are concerned about how widely used Cloudflare is and that this risks making them a gatekeeper to the internet. My beef is more of an “all eggs in one basket” one, which feels especially relevant given that the recent (and in many cases, ongoing) Crowdstrike debacle was able to affect so many because of how the way enterprise level software often involves many eggs across not many baskets.

I don’t know how to articulate an answer to this right now, but I wanted to say that this was a great question, OP — there’s some really cool answered here

Other freaks love it however

Useful dating advice

"Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari’s operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used. […>

“We’ll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action,” an RIAJ spokesperson said."

Obligatory “Fuck Cloudflare”.

It genuinely makes my skin crawl — reminds me of being nagged for sex from someone who hears “not now” when you mean “no.”

See, that’s what I thought too, but according to the Captchas, I don’t know what a motorcycle is ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

What really stresses me out is the question of whether a human on a motorcycle becomes part of the motorcycle.

As a gamer, I was anxious about switching to Linux as my daily driver, but I needed to fully immerse myself to improve at Linux, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how few gaming related problems I’ve had.

I agree that’s a better article, thanks for sharing

I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I’ve just imported get a tag of “new”, which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don’t do it at time of import).

Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I’m wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I’d have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might’ve known which was which, but if there’s a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I’m quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I’ve been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I’m still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it’s easy to forget why I’m reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I’ve read also.

Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn’t make it one of my books, ‘taking it home’ and putting it away on my ‘bookshelf’ makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn’t really work and that pruning little and often helps more.

A somewhat cheesy quote that helped me a lot is “you can be the juiciest, ripest peach in the world, but some people just don’t like peaches”. I used to try way too hard to be likeable and I agonised over people who didn’t like me.

There was an instance of a colleague being rude and unprofessional to me, and under the framework of “they don’t like me and that’s why they’re being unkind”, it put the onus on me to change, which wasn’t reasonable. It should be possible for people to not like each other in a working relationship while still being respectful and productive.

Okay, well this is actually super cool, thanks for driving my attention there. It seems that the word for this particular behaviour is "Nyctinasty

I think the short answer to your question appears to be “we don’t know”, because nyctinasty has been observed for millennia but there isn’t a clear, conclusive answer. In some plants that are open at night, it may be that they are pollinated by bats or nocturnal insects, but one of the open questions here is “does nocturnal nyctinasty happen via the same mechanism as diurnal nyctinasty?”. By that, I mean “does a nocturnal plant (like moonflower) use the same ‘muscles’ as a plant that’s open during day, like water lily?”.

I don’t recall it mentioning water lilies, but a book that you’d probably enjoy if you’re curious about this stuff is What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz. I remember there is some really interesting stuff in there about plant circadian rhythms, and the information is presented in an accessible and entertaining manner